Democrats avoided the worst outcome in the California governor’s race. While it will take several more days for the state’s mail-in ballots to be counted, former congressman, California attorney general, and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra will finish among the top two candidates and therefore advance to the general election. What’s not yet clear is whether Republican Steve Hilton or billionaire Tom Steyer, another Democrat, will be the second candidate. With at least one Democrat in the general election, the most important governorship in the country will almost certainly stay out of Republican hands this November. Thank goodness.
But Democrats shouldn’t take much comfort in avoiding a catastrophe. The political party that’s supposed to stop fascism in America is so disorganized and divided that it struggled to secure victory in a state where a clear majority of voters are left-leaning. This Democratic debacle in California makes me deeply concerned about the upcoming presidential primary and general election.
For months, there was a very real possibility that only Republican candidates would make it to the general election, because the California Democratic vote would be split among a field of a myriad of candidates. Then the media and Donald Trump saved California Democrats. Journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN reported numerous accusations of sexual misconduct by then-Representative Eric Swalwell, who was one of the leading Democratic candidates. That helped the party’s voters consolidate around Becerra and Steyer. Meanwhile, Trump endorsed Hilton, a Brit and a former Fox News personality, effectively dooming Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, the other prominent (and more conventionally qualified) Republican.
I’m glad we have investigative journalists and strong news organizations, but a well-functioning political party should be vetting candidates on its own and ensuring it doesn’t nominate alleged sexual harassers. Swalwell’s improper behavior around women wasn’t a secret in Democratic circles in Washington or California, and yet party insiders did little to prevent him from becoming one of the front-runners for a hugely important post. I don’t praise Trump very often, but I respect that he is willing to actively lead the voters in his party by urging them to back particular candidates in primaries. It would have been nice if Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and all of the California Democratic politicians who write books about their courage and wisdom had actually shown some of that by endorsing someone in the governor’s race and making sure Swalwell never became a top contender. (It’s hard to imagine prominent California Democrats had no inkling of Swalwell’s conduct around women.)
Instead, California Democratic Party leaders seemed to go out of their way not to help voters sort through a field without a clear front-runner. Newsom’s aides leaked to reporters his misgivings about all of the candidates. When the University of Southern California tried to host a debate and include only the candidates with decent poll numbers, some Democratic state legislators blasted the process as racist because low-polling candidates of color would be excluded. As Becerra started rising in the polls, people in the Biden administration started slamming him, usually via anonymous quotes, as ineffective as HHS secretary. Who then should California Democrats vote for? These people never said. It was almost as if Democratic Party leaders were intentionally trying to create a chaotic primary.
Steyer or Becerra will almost certainly be elected in November, so what’s the problem? Well, the party’s struggle to land on a candidate in California isn’t an isolated incident. The 2020 and 2024 presidential primaries illustrated the same problems. In 2020, there was a massive field of Democratic candidates. Primary voters couldn’t easily sort among them. Many Democratic groups and politicians stayed on the sidelines instead of endorsing anyone. The result was a haphazard process that selected Joe Biden, a bad choice because his age ensured Democrats would again have a presidential quandary in 2024.
By mid-2023, it was obvious that a clear majority of Americans were wary of giving Biden a second term. But the party waited a full year to coordinate around sidelining Biden, leading to another haphazard process that produced a candidate (Kamala Harris) who wasn’t one of the party’s strongest politicians and didn’t have time to run a full campaign.
Why can’t the Democratic Party effectively choose candidates for the most important races? For three reasons. First, there is a real and growing divide between the party’s progressive wing and its center-left—and many prominent Democrats don’t want to seem too aligned with either camp. It’s not surprising that politicians, whose job is to be popular, want to appeal to as many people as possible. But maintaining ideological neutrality in today’s Democratic Party essentially means you can’t participate in key races, since they often pit a progressive against a centrist. So you end up with Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer refusing to say if they voted for Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race, and Barack Obama expressing his enthusiasm for Mamdani on the eve of the election but not formally endorsing him. Schumer and Gillibrand likely favored Cuomo but didn’t want to piss off progressives; Obama likely favored Mamdani but didn’t want to annoy centrists.
In California, I assume Newsom does not want to be succeeded by Steyer, who has aligned with progressives and backs a proposed wealth tax that the incumbent governor strongly opposes. But Newsom, ahead of his likely 2028 presidential run, probably doesn’t want to formally declare himself as hostile to progressive candidates and therefore progressive voters. Hence he said little about one of the most important elections in the country, one happening in his home state.
The problem is that if current and even former prominent Democratic politicians like Obama are trying to avoid making any commitments, Democratic voters are left confused.
Second, the party has become obsessed with punditry and election strategy. A logical approach would be to endorse the candidate for an office who you think would best do the job, or the one who is most aligned with your ideological preferences. But that’s not what happens in Democratic Party circles these days. Endorsing a candidate who loses is treated as a sign that you don’t understand the electorate, so even your policy stands should be ignored; winning candidates and campaigns get reverence and deference.
Biden’s team rejected warnings from fellow Democrats that he was a weak candidate for 2024 by constantly noting that he had been underestimated by others in the party during the 2020 primaries. That’s silly. Elections are hard to predict; conditions change; Biden’s aides weren’t geniuses in 2020, nor were they total fools in 2024. But in a party where power and authority are given to those who claim they are election soothsayers, the safest course is to never endorse anyone in an election so you will never look stupid. That’s what many Democratic groups and politicians did in 2020 nationally and in California this year.
Third, as political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in a recent book, the Democratic Party (and in many ways the GOP, as well) is “hollow,” without a strong structure. The California Democratic Party, like most state parties today, has very little power. The Democratic National Committee is fairly weak too. The real power is with prominent politicians like Harris, Pelosi, Obama, and Newsom, as well as left-leaning unions and groups. But Newsom and Harris probably don’t think of themselves as party leaders whose job it is to shape primaries by encouraging some candidates and discouraging others. They didn’t seek that role. They may not want it. In reality, though, unless the most famous politicians in the party endorse candidates, primaries turn into protracted contests like in California this year.
There’s an alternative to this scattershot approach to primaries: what Mamdani and Trump are doing. Yes, those two don’t seem much alike. But in this one way, they’re similar. Trump has a clear sense of the kinds of Republicans he wants in office. He endorses his favorites in primaries and accepts that sometimes his candidates lose, without being gun-shy about making future endorsements.
In New York City, Mamdani is interjecting himself into a lot of races, usually endorsing candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. In making these endorsements, Mamdani and Trump are offering clarity to primary voters: Republicans can vote for or against the MAGA candidate; Democrats for or against the DSA one. Mamdani and Trump are both leading, actively giving guidance to the voters in their parties. That’s what Democratic officials in California should have been doing the last six months.
And we need that kind of leadership going forward. Democratic Party leaders need to decide if they can give full-throated support to Maine’s Graham Platner amid the numerous controversies around him—or find a way to force him out of the race and get a new candidate. They can’t spend the next few months alternating between supporting Platner and leaking to reporters their doubts about him. They have to either defeat Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate primary there or support him enthusiastically if he is the nominee. Most importantly, the next presidential primary can’t result in a candidate with obvious challenges (being almost 80; given less than 110 days to run) because Democrats can’t coordinate.
Even if Becerra and Steyer both make it to the general election, the California gubernatorial race is the latest illustration of a Democratic Party that can’t choose or vet candidates well. That’s not some minor flaw. American democracy might not be in peril if Democrats had chosen better presidential candidates in 2020 or 2024. This can’t keep happening. Democratic Party leaders need to start leading their party—before it’s too late.
